The sextant has an anodized brass frame and a wooden handle. The tangent screw is on top of the index arm and the clamping screw is on the back. The instrument has no shades, but a star glass (stellar lenticular). Index- and horizon-glass adjustment is made by a square-headed screw and a detached key.

Attached to the sextant is a single lens magnifier on a 108mm swivelling arm. There is also a threaded telescope bracket which is non-adjustable. The telescope is 160 mm in length with an erect image and a wide objective lens (star finder). Accompanying the instrument is a milled adjusting key and a screwdriver.

The instrument has a polished brass limb with an inlaid ivory scale from -5° to 125° by 20 arcminutes, measuring to 106°. The sextant has an ivory vernier measuring to 30 arcseconds, with zero at the right.

The sextant is contained in a square fitted wooden box, with a note on the index error in English, dated 1888.

This object once belonged to Prince George, later King George V (1865-1936), who was sent to train as a Royal Naval officer in HMS ‘Britannia’ in 1877.

This instrument has been identified as a sextant because it measures between 106 and 135 degrees. The inventor however, regarded it as an octant.

Captain Pierre Michel Albert Laurent, of the Compagnie Générale Trans-Atlantique at Le Havre, patented the star glass for elongating the image of a star into a horizontal line (provisional patent no. 2426 of 1859 and no. 2665 of 1864, and in the USA no. 47,778 of 1865). S.g.d.g. (sans garantie de gouvernement) means that although the instrument was patented, there was no government guarantee, and only the inventor was responsible for the object’s quality.